from the celebrity-endorsement,-government-propaganda,-corporate-jingle-wasteland dept

As we noted back in November, the Chinese authorities have started clamping down heavily on users of the Weibo microblogging site accused of violating "censorship guidelines." An interesting question is: what effect is this having on the public's use of Weibo? Thanks to The Telegraph newspaper, we now have some idea:

Research commissioned by the Telegraph shows that the number of posts on the hugely successful Twitter-like microblog [Weibo] may have fallen by as much as 70 per cent in the wake of an aggressive campaign by the Communist party to intimidate influential users.

Once an incalculably important public space for news and opinion -- a fast-flowing river of information that censors struggled to contain -- it has arguably now been reduced to a wasteland of celebrity endorsements, government propaganda and corporate jingles.

That probably means that people are now employing other means to pass on information, rumors and comments that would get them into trouble on Weibo. And that, of course, also implies that the Chinese authorities will widen their net to include those other services once they become enough of a threat. And so the cat-and-mouse game will continue, leaving behind it a trail of burned-out Internet services full of those "celebrity endorsements, government propaganda and corporate jingles."

from the turning-online-into-offline dept

We've written a number of times of the various ways in which China tries to police its online world. These include punishing individuals, as well as imposinggeneralrules that apply to everybody. Until now, it's been hard to tell to what extent the latter were just saber-rattling. Now we know, thanks to a new post on the Global Voices site:

According to the Beijing District Joint Platform Against Rumor, more than 103,673 Sina Weibo users have been penalized since August 2013 for violating the Weibo "community code of practice (CoP)" and the "Seven Self-Censorship Guidelines".

An official release alleges that among the penalized Weibo users:

1,030 distributed untruthful information
75,264 published personal attack comments
14,357 harassed other users
3,773 published indecent and obscene materials
9,246 engaged in other forms of misconduct such as copying other users' content

The newly implemented community penalties range from temporary account suspension to permanent deletion of accounts.

Numbers aside, what's interesting here is that the vast majority of users were punished for "personal attack comments" -- at least that's how things are presented:

As one netizen pointed out, "this is just an excuse to silence those who are critical of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)". Another user pointed out that the Party-sponsored online commentators are "immune to" the community rule even when they have launched personal attack comments against political liberals. It appears that the so-called "community" rule only applies to dissenting voices.

What's clever about this is that not only are people with inconvenient views silenced, but their protests are redefined to be the far less glamorous "personal attack comments". As Global Voices concludes, the net effect of these moves is that:

dissenters have been forbidden to speak out online and ordinary netizens are slowly being disciplined into behaving as passive consumers of online information through the imposition of "community code of practice."

In other words, the online world is slowly becoming like the offline one. Does that mean the Internet in China is on its way to being tamed? It seems unlikely, but only time will tell.

from the maybe-they-won't-notice dept

It will hardly come as a surprise to anyone to learn that a popular writer and well-known critic of China's pervasive censorship system has run into trouble for his views. Fortunately, in this case that doesn't mean getting arrested, but nonetheless involves quite a dramatic slapdown:

The online Sina Weibo microblogging account of Murong Xuecun, one of China's most popular writers and one of the country's foremost critics of censorship, has been deleted from the site, suspected to be part of the government's efforts to crack down on online rumors by targeting high-profile users.

Murong's account, which had more than 1.1 million followers, was taken down from the Twitter-link website on May 11, 2013. His writing as well as his microblogging discusses social issues in contemporary China such as corruption and media censorship.

The Global Voices story quoted above goes on to describe the ways in which some of those 1.1 million followers have reacted, and how many feel that Sina Weibo is diminished by Murong's absence. It also points out that all of his posts have been preserved and are available -- but on the other side of the Great Firewall of China (GFW). Although only those with the requisite technical know-how to tunnel under the GFW using VPNs will be able to access the now-deleted messages, that doesn't mean the Chinese authorities have really won here. After all, using censorship to silence a critic of censorship means that his 1.1 million (ex-)followers now have definitive proof of what he was warning them about.

from the Whac-A-Mole dept

In a country where the mainstream media is tightly controlled, Chinese microblogs have provided an invaluable way for millions of people to find and share unofficial information. That's obviously problematic for the Chinese authorities, who have been gradually clamping down on what they term "rumors".

Things came to a head recently when posts about an alleged political coup in the country appeared on leading microblog services Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo, resulting in both of them being punished for failing to pull the rumors fast enough. Now Sina, whose microblog service passed the 300-million user mark recently, has instituted strict rules for users, presumably in an attempt to placate the Chinese government and head off future punishments.

According to the regulations, users logging more than 5 posts of "sensitive information" would be prevented from posting for 48 hours and have the relevant content deleted. Further, those users posting "sensitive content" with "malicious intent" would be prevented from posting for more than 48 hours and face the possibility of having their account terminated.

Users have the right to publish information, but may not publish any information that:

1. Opposes the basic principles established by the constitution
2. Harms the unity, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of the nation
3. Reveals national secrets, endangers national security, or threatens the the honor or interests of the nation
4. Incites ethnic hatred or ethnic discrimination, undermines ethnic unity, or harms ethnic traditions and customs
5. Promotes evil teachings and superstitions
6. Spreads rumors, disrupts social order, and destroys societal stability
7. Promotes illicit activity, gambling, violence, or calls for the committing of crimes
8. Calls for disruption of social order through illegal gatherings, formation of organizations, protests, demonstrations, mass gatherings and assemblies
9. Has other content which is forbidden by laws, administrative regulations and national regulations.

It is not permitted to use oblique expression or other methods to get around the aforementioned restrictions

However, this probably just means that microblog users will become even more "oblique" in their techniques to route around the new forms of censorship. Short of shutting down such services completely -- a move that would probably be dangerously unpopular now that so many people use them -- it's hard to see how the Chinese authorities can ever completely stamp out this kind of inventiveness.